Businesses today face giant risks at almost every turn. One place where they aren’t always expecting to face risks, at least not until after disaster strikes the first time, is in the area of digital storage. In fact, many small business owners and managers don’t even realize how vulnerable their data is until after something major happens that makes it painfully clear. These are just four of the major risks businesses face by not investing in a high-quality digital storage solution.
1) Legal Risks – The most immediate legal risk for many small businesses to consider is the one associated with compliance. Many governments have passed stringent laws in regards to data security. Businesses have a responsibility to protect the information they collect from their customers and governments have passed laws to ensure they do. The other legal risks come from litigation. Businesses are required to keep a greater volume of information on hand for longer periods of time in order to have records to pull if litigation or lawsuits are filed. Failure to have this information could prove costly if lawsuits are ever filed against small businesses. The greater the volume of information required to keep on hand, the more important digital storage solutions become.
2) Financial Risks – There are also major financial risks involved in failing to use proper digital storage solutions for the information your business collects and keeps on hand. The first risk is in the costs of keeping the massive storage infrastructure on your own property to handle large volumes of data. It’s not an inexpensive endeavor by a long-shot. Then you need to employ skilled labor to keep the servers in proper running order. The price tag doesn’t take long to reach astronomical proportions. If emergencies arise (weather emergencies, fire, and countless other potential emergencies) there is the added expense of monitoring and protecting that information so that it doesn’t become a sudden liability for your business.
3) Physical Risks – The truth of the matter is that your own personal systems and servers only have so much space available on them. Your business is constantly gathering and collecting new data. That data must be stored. Eventually you’re going to run out of space. That means you’ll have to find off-site solutions for storing and backing up that information. The only other options available are that you would purge the information or stop gathering information (which essentially means go out of business in the information age). The other physical risks are more immediate in nature. Wind, rain, fire, and flood all pose significant risks to your property—not to mention theft and other man-made disasters. Off-site digital storage protects that information even when you cannot.
4) Security Risks – The final major risk to note when it comes to digital storage solutions involve security. You are in your field of business. That’s what you know. You do not know how to keep hackers out of your information and protect the piles of data and personal information you have on your customers. Perhaps more than you even realize. The bottom line is that this information is a huge draw for potential hackers and a huge potential liability for you.
Protect your business by not only investing in high-quality off-site digital storage solutions. But also investing in cyber liability insurance for those times when your best efforts may not have been quite good enough. No matter how much you try to avoid risks, business insurance like this helps mitigate your risks.
